Ministers fail to agree on migration deal

EU countries struggled Monday to agree on several measures aimed at addressing the migration crisis, and ministers failed to reach a consensus on a controversial European Commission proposal to relocate 120,000 refugees.

Slovakia and the Czech Republic opposed the plan to relocate the additional migrants, as proposed by the Commission, unless it is clear that it will be carried out on a voluntary basis, EU diplomats said. Diplomatic sources said a clash between France’s Bernard Cazeneuve and Slovakia’s Robert Kalinak made a final deal more difficult to reach.

The Commission has pushed for the relocation quotas to be mandatory for EU countries.

“There is an agreement in principle that is backed by a large majority [of countries] and we can proceed on that,” said Jean Asselborn, the interior minister of Luxembourg, which holds the rotating EU presidency, at the end of the conference. Asselborn said that “we aim for an adoption at the October 8” meeting of interior ministers.

It was the latest in a series of “very heated debates,” said Migration Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos. The Council has formally adopted the previous relocation of 40,000 refugees but on the more ambitious proposal “we didn’t have the agreement we wanted,” he told reporters. “A majority of the member states are ready to move forward but not all of them.”

The meeting put a great emphasis on the quick set up of hotspots to quickly detect those in need of protection in Italy and Greece as a pre-condition of relocation, said Asselborn.

At the end of the meeting the conclusions stated that the Council has “agreed in principle to relocate an additional 120,000 persons,” but the decision was not taken unanimously. Asselborn pointed out that the final document was issued on behalf of the EU presidency and not the whole Council.

The conclusion does not mention from which states the refugees will be relocated. In the Commission’s proposal, refugees were expected to be relocated from Italy, Greece and Hungary.

In a press conference with Cazeneuve while the meeting was still going on, German Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière confirmed there had been no breakthrough deal on a mandatory quota system. On Friday European Council President Donald Tusk said he would call an emergency summit of EU leaders if this meeting failed to produce “a concrete sign of solidarity.”

A draft set of conclusions circulated before Monday’s meeting began retained the commitment to relocate the 120,000, but left out crucial details on how it would be carried out — and how the burden would be shared.

But by Monday afternoon the Commission was lowering its expectations. In a briefing before the ministers’ meeting, a spokeswoman said that for the Commission “mandatory is the best way forward” but that “if the result is achieved, that is the most important thing.”

The numbers being discussed by ministers are still only a fraction of the potential influx of refugees, which Germany’s Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel estimated in a letter to members of his Social Democratic party (SPD) could be as high as one million people this year — in Germany alone.

Germany’s decision Sunday to reintroduce border controls along its frontier with Austria also complicated talks ahead of the Council meeting. By Monday, other EU nations had moved to temporarily suspend the Schengen agreement, with the Netherlands, Austria and Slovakia all imposing some level of border control.

The question of whether the relocation of refugees in Europe should be mandatory or voluntary has been one of the main problems for many nations, especially Eastern European and Baltic countries. The same argument slowed agreement on an earlier proposal by the Commission to relocate 40,000 refugees from Italy and Greece. EU ministers did agree Monday evening to finalize that earlier agreement, meaning that the relocation of some asylum-seekers now in Italy and Greece can begin.

EU officials say Hungary’s reluctance to be considered a front-line border state was a problem in the negotiations on the new proposal. Earlier this month, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said the country was ready to consider a relocation plan that resulted in refugees leaving Hungary.

But after the proposal was unveiled by Juncker, Budapest backtracked, asking not to take part in the relocation package even though it would result in 54,000 refugees being moved out of Hungary (as well as 50,400 from Greece and 15,600 from Italy).

“I told the Hungarians that they should be the solution and not the problem,” said Jean Asselborn, the minister of foreign and European affairs of Luxembourg, before the meeting began. “We want to help them. But the key to Europe’s functioning is not in the hands of Mr. Orbán. I hope we will find a solution.”

Interior ministers from Germany, France, Hungary, Italy and Greece held a separate meeting with representatives of the European Commission and the Luxembourg EU presidency ahead of the start of the Council, officials said.

The French and German ministers said they were not satisfied with the draft conclusions prepared ahead of the meeting by the Luxembourg presidency.

“We need a precise description of the way the relocation scheme will work,” said de Maizière in a joint press conference with Cazeneuve.

Commission officials said Monday that Germany’s move to reinstate border controls was justified under the current circumstances and that Berlin had given assurances that the move was temporary.

They added that if it appeared that there would be a domino effect of too many countries enacting controls, they could ask the Council to assess the situation on the ground and intervene. But EU officials stressed this was not currently the case.

Also on Monday, the EU announced that the naval mission it launched in May to deal with people smugglers is ready to move from an initial intelligence-gathering phase to a more active operation involving search and seizure of traffickers’ vessels.

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RRS

Where does this 120,000 number come from? Setting arbitary targets for distribution of migrants across the continent doesn’t seem to make any sense to me unless someone can explain the purpose behind it. Take 120,000 this year while thousands (millions) more die in Syria? Is this an annual intake or a one-off?